Having earned good notices for its production of Anna Zeigler’s biographical women-in-science drama Photograph 51 in its 2022 season (including one from Limelight), Ensemble Theatre has programmed another in the form of US writer Lauren Gunderson’s The Half-Life of Marie Curie.

Originally commissioned by the audiobook giant Audible for a season in New York’s Minetta Lane Theater in 2019, it spotlights a lesser known period in the life of the great French inventor-scientist Marie Curie – one during which she was hounded out of Paris by a popular press bent on demonising her for an extra-marital affair.

Burned out and desperate, Marie (Gabrielle Scawthorn) accepts an invite from an ardent fellow traveller, Hertha Ayrton (Rebecca Massey), a brilliant English electromechanical engineer and campaigner for women’s suffrage offering a secluded beachside house as a refuge.

Once there, away from the prying press and from men more generally, Gunderson has them passionately discuss their accomplishments, their mutual admiration (Ayrton’s is rather more boundless than Curie’s) and the indignities and hypocrisies they endure as women scientists.

Gabrielle Scawthorn and Rebecca Massey in The Half-Life of Marie Curie. Photo © Prudence Upton

The dramatically heightened, occasionally...